The traditional providers of end-of-life care for most of history were called your own children. This has changed over the last 75 years or so and now people are upset that the cost of providing messy, high stress, praiseless, 24/7 work costs a lot of money.
I thought that the nursing home charged an outrageous amount for the care of my father. So I invested in nursing home stocks.
I lost a chunk of money, they turned out to be lousy investments.
If they are making fabulous profits, I'm not seeing it in the stock performance.
It seems like the PE firms are squaring this circle by offering diminished services, turning away sicker patients, and so on, or that's what the article says.
But is the staffing and standard of care different? Do the patients of investor owned hospices suffer with a higher incidence of bed sores? Do they suffer longer?
Unless they are defrauding these people, I don't see the issue in profits off of hospice. Hospice availability is a huge issue. The only thing worse than paying a lot for hospice is not getting hospice because there are no vacancies. If the profit incentive to run a nursing home or palliative care facility were eliminated, supply would fall through the floor creating a bigger issue than someone having the gall to earn money.
And supply would fall because no one is doing this sort of work out of the goodness of their own hearts, unless they are religious. And there are quite a few religious facilities out there but the numbers are dwindling.
When the simple majority of Americans are priced out of this kind of care from bloated profit margins how does that differ substantively from a lack of vacancies? While you're grappling with that here's another one: Mondragon and it's constellation of affiliate co-ops rather soundly puts the lie to the notion that profit motive is the sole driver of human activity. Apparently the world isn't entirely populated by sociopaths so it's still possible to get shit done without making a handful of individuals grotesquely wealthy in the process.
Mondragon is absolutely a for-profit, money-motiviated firm. It doesn't do things for free. The difference is that the shareholders are the employees rather than investors.
There is nothing illegal about starting a co-op, but in practice they are quite difficult because of the capital needed up front to start a business. That is to say, it's much easier to ask a VC for $5 million in series A funding than it is for the 10 devs running the thing to put up $500,000 each of their own money.
You're pretending financial institutions don't exist (business loans are absolutely a thing) and that all forms of profit-taking are ethically equivalent. What, exactly, are you stanning here?
These places are often operating with ratios like 30 patients under the care of a single nurse making $30k a year. They will charge the state $12k a month for the service.
They charge a high price because what is the state going to do, NOT put people in an old age home when they have no where else to go? It's a completely captured market, because the government isn't allowed to run it's own system, because that would be "socialism" and "death panels".
It's not the solution necessarily but income equals expenditure. They're one and the same. People need to stop pretending that the true cost of hospice care is much cheaper than what's charged today. Look at what non-profits charge. It's still eye watering sums, and not much different than investor owned hospice care quotes.
Your greatest hint into the fact that end of life care genuinely costs a lot is that LTC insurers keep going bankrupt. Insurance companies don't like going bankrupt.
I don’t think history supports this thesis. Most children went away to the cities or other countries or even other continents. Maybe if you where one of the fewer and fewer people who still had a farm you might have one child taking it over, but if you were born in a city then that’s obviously not possible.
I guess it might be possible you moved to where one of your children lived, if you even knew where they ended up.
You are describing last 100 years of US history and it is not "most of the history". What you are describing was still not prevalent through the world like 50 years ago.
This is very very recent North America-and-other-settler-colony history. Even today, most Americans live within 20 miles of their parents. Most people don't live in different settlements to their parents, let alone cities, let alone countries, _let alone_ continents.
